Mike Carroll was a practicing lawyer in Washington DC when the idea of openly licensed copyright landed on his desk as a pro bono project. “It was going to be a central repository of content, where we had the copyright and would openly license it to others,” he says. After a group brainstorm led by Larry Lessig at the Harvard Berkman Center in May 2001, the lawyers decided to scrap the central repository idea and create licenses that others could use freely. Shortly after that, Carroll was invited to join the board of the organization that would soon become known as Creative Commons.

CC quickly evolved from an idea that artists were skeptical about—why would any creative person be willing to give up control?—to something that proliferated across state borders and disciplines.

“The Internet is global, and we knew we would have to grapple with the complexities of international copyright and that we would add science to the mix,” he says. “But the pressure to do that came much faster than we expected. In short order, we had to organize a pretty sophisticated operation on a limited budget to engage with the international network of support for the Creative Commons idea.”

Still, Carroll says, there are challenges ahead. “We are offering tools as a solution to a problem that not everyone knows they have.” For one thing, awareness about what open content is, and why making it legally open matters, is still a bit hazy for some. The good news is that some web sites have seamlessly integrated CC into their functions, like the Flickr search engine. The challenge is to engage with the continuing evolution of the web to make sure adopting CC is easy and natural.

“We care deeply about not getting locked into things that can’t evolve as the web evolves. If it were easier to find reliable CC content, that makes using CC licenses more attractive. We’re trying to keep the web open in an interoperable space—but it’s not just the technology. It’s the values embedded in our technical choices.”

He’s also a hobby musician who sometimes gets together with other copyright lawyers to jam. “I’m one of those musicians [that loves] to play to the crowd,” he says, in the same spirit of an organization dedicated to helping other creators share.

]]>https://creativecommons.org/2010/12/14/meet-our-board-members-mike-carroll/feed/224826NIH Open Access mandate made permanenthttps://creativecommons.org/2009/03/17/nih-open-access-mandate-made-permanent/
Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:21:22 +0000http://creativecommons.org/?p=13408Over on the Science Commons blog, Thinh writes: The NIH Public Access Policy, which was due to expire this year, has now been made permanent by the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, signed into law last week. Last year, Science Commons, SPARC, and ARL jointly released a White Paper authored by our board member Mike Carroll … Read More "NIH Open Access mandate made permanent"

Last year, Science Commons, SPARC, and ARL jointly released a White Paper authored by our board member Mike Carroll called “Complying With the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy,” explaining the new NIH-mandated PubMed deposit requirement and questions that grant recipients should consider in designing a program to comply with it. At that time, the new mandatory policy had just taken effect, and many recipients were still learning how to comply. Nevertheless, the results were dramatic. Prior to NIH’s mandatory deposit requirement, under a voluntary policy NIH began in 2005, the compliance rate in terms of deposits in PubMed had been very low (4%, as published in an NIH report to Congress in 2006). Shortly after the adoption of the new mandatory policy, submissions spiked to an all time high, prompting an NIH official to project compliance rates of 55-60%. Just take a look at this NIH chart, and note the sharp rise after the policy took effect in early 2008.

In a subsequent White Paper that Science Commons and SPARC jointly issued, our recommendations included looking beyond compliance with the new policy and taking this opportunity to develop comprehensive institutional deposit and public access policies, such as Harvard’s open access policy.

Making the NIH Public Access Policy permanent will provide scholars and institutions with much needed certainty and impetus to focus on implementing these requirements within their institutions. It also creates a opportunity for scholars, universities, and the research community to take a broader look at their institution’s scholarly publishing and open access policies, not only as it applies to deposit in PubMed, but also as it applies to their own institutional repositories and scholarly communities.

We will work with our collaborators to develop further policy and legal briefings for university and public research institutions who are studying these issues. Look for that this summer.